OnLive opens to public

Streaming games platform OnLive has opened its Beta to gamers – the first time the service has become publicly available.

Consumers register on the firm's website to apply. OnLive founder and CEO Steve Perlman said that the company was keen to hear feedback from those who test the service.

He added that the Beta was a ‘huge milestone' for the games-on-demand technology, and that the testing would help the service's creators iron out bugs.

I'm very excited to say that we are now opening the OnLive Beta to outside gamers who signed up on our website,” he said. It's not too late to sign up if you haven't already. We are very much looking forward to hearing from gamers all about their experience with the OnLive Service.

One of the key challenges that OnLive technology addresses is providing a high-quality, fast-response gaming experience over a wide range of situations: different speeds/locations/types of broadband services, a variety of different PC and Mac configurations, several kinds of input and display devices, etc. So, a major focus of OnLive Beta is to test as many of these different situations as we can."

OnLive was first revealed at GDC in March, a revelation that some to question whether the service could become the 'death of hardware'.

Publishers including EA, Take Two and Ubisoft have signed up to back the tech, but experts have predicted that Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft will neever support the service.

Speaking ont he firm's official website today, Perlman added: When you sign up for OnLive Beta, you tell us some general information about your ISP, your computer configuration and your location. We use this information to organize Beta testers into test groups so that our engineering team can focus at different times on testing different situations. If you are a potential fit for a particular test group, we'll send you an invitation email, asking you to run a detailed Performance Test on your network connection and your computer configuration.

"The results of the Performance Test will then feed back up to OnLive, and if you are a fit for a test group at some point during Beta, we'll let you install the OnLive plug-in into your browser. Then, we'll ask you to spend some time playing…um, I mean…testing games OnLive.

As testers interact with the service and play games, OnLive will be constantly logging technical data, and then afterward, we'll ask testers to give us feedback about their personal experiences with OnLive. This feedback will help us continue to evolve the features and experience of the OnLive Service, so it's really important we get lots of feedback to bring the gaming community the best videogame platform and service possible.

Another important goal of the Beta is to shake out bugs so we can fix them. So, it's very important that you let us know what bugs you run into.

Beta is an AWESOME milestone for OnLive, capping many years of work. We're really looking forward to hearing what you think.